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DIVERSITY
Ebert Speaker Tells History of Racial Divide in MedicineMore than 200 years ago, statistician Frederick Hoffman predicted the black race would die out by the year 2000. The forecast was based on terrible disease and death rates that he and other white people ascribed to the "natural" infirmity of the slaves.
Addressing the audience at his Ebert lecture, Richard Allen Williams challenged each member to do something personally to close health disparities. (Photo by Liza Green, HMS Media Services) The centuries-old disparities in treatment and health outcomes persist today, said cardiologist Richard Allen Williams, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine. "Some might say that [Hoffman] was just off his mark and that the predicted disappearance of blacks due to disease and poor health care was just a few years premature," said Williams, who gave the 2004 Robert H. Ebert Lecture on April 23. The lecture was sponsored by the Office of Recruitment and Multicultural Affairs and the Multicultural Alliance at HMS. It took place during revisitation weekend, when underrepresented minority applicants who have been accepted to the Medical and Dental Schools are invited to return for another look. "There is ample proof that racism in medicine still exists and is a lethal force which robs minorities of life and health," Williams said. Despite improvements in life expectancy for the U.S. population in the last century, disparities still exist, he said. One projection shows that out of 1,000 white people born in 1974, 639 can expect to live to age 70. Only 478 of 1,000 nonwhites will survive as long. Science and medicine have stood at the forefront of the poor health status of African Americans and other minorities. "It didn't all come from the South," Williams said. Premier physicians and scientists of the day, including John Collins Warren at HMS, taught the pseudoscience of phrenology, which held that whites were smarter than blacks since their average skull size was larger. Racist attitudes extended into medical schools, Williams said. In 1850, the first black student at HMS, Martin Robison Delaney, had to attend classes in a caged area, but that was still not separate enough for the white students, so he was expelled by HMS dean Oliver Wendell Holmes. More than 100 years later, only 22 black medical students had attended HMS by the time Williams arrived in Boston in 1968 as a cardiology fellow at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an instructor in medicine at HMS. Williams was the first African-American postgraduate trainee at HMS, including interns, residents, and fellows at all of the affiliated hospitals. Williams ignored the advice of his HMS mentors "not to rock the boat." He founded the Central Recruitment Council of Boston Hospitals and campaigned for more recruiting and higher acceptance rates of black and other minority students and hospital house staff at HMS, Boston University, Tufts, and their affiliated hospitals. A petition drive culminated in a meeting with the council, HMS dean Robert Ebert, and members of the Black Panthers and Nation of Islam. Ebert pledged restitution and soon bumped up the 1 percent minority enrollment at HMS to 18 percent. Several years later, Williams wrote the Textbook of Black-related Diseases, the first and only textbook of medicine written by a black person about illnesses that predominantly affect blacks, he said. "Now the question is, what are you going to do about it?" Williams said. "You can help. This thing has to be turned around; otherwise it will persist into the next millennium." --Carol Cruzan Morton |
